"A publisher in New York asked me to write down what I know about the Greek gods, and I was like, Can we do this anonymously? Because I don't need the Olympians mad at me again. But if it helps you to know your Greek gods, and survive an encounter with them if they ever show up in your face, then I guess writing all this down will be my good deed for the week. So begins Percy Jackson's Greek Gods, in which the son of Poseidon adds his own magic--and...

A little girl falls down a rabbit hole and discovers a world of nonsensical and amusing characters.

Originally published in 1859, "Adam Bede" is the first novel by George Eliot, which was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. Eliot was one of the leading British writers of the Victorian era, as well as a noted journalist, poet, and translator. "Adam Bede" concerns a small, tight-knit, and fictional rural community called Hayslope and the romantic drama that develops between four of its young residents: the title character Adam, a young carpenter, the...

Death in Venice (German: Der Tod in Venedig) is a novella written by the German author Thomas Mann published in 1912. The work presents a great writer who visits Venice and is liberated, uplifted, and then increasingly obsessed by the sight of a stunningly beautiful youth. Tadzio, the boy in the story, is the nickname for the Polish name Tadeusz and is based on a boy Mann had seen during his visit to Venice in 1911. As the story opens, he is strolling...

A young man returns from abroad to claim his inheritance - but he never arrives and is presumed to have drowned in the Thames. Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, a warmhearted, working-class couple, are the next heirs in line, and their generosity is tested when their windfall opens the door to a vast gallery of scoundrels, strivers, and social climbers. Charles Dickens's genius for observing and characterizing people from every walk of life sparkles in this, his...

Written in 1912 and set in and around London, "The Reef" is a story of complex morality and its intricately woven place in society. This narrative primarily follows George Darrow and Anna Leath, a young gentleman and a widowed lady who plan to marry. Both of them experience doubts about their union, with surprising outcomes. Darrow has a brief liaison with the delicate, generous Sophy Viner, a kind woman of the working class. She later meets Anna's...

One of the most influential novels of the nineteenth century, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment tells the tragic story of Raskolnikov-a talented former student whose warped philosophical outlook drives him to commit murder. Surprised by his sense of guilt and terrified of the consequences of his actions, Raskolnikov wanders through the slums of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg trying to escape the ever-suspicious Porfiry, the official investigating...

This early work by James Joyce was originally published in 1939 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. 'Finnegans Wake' is a an experimental novel of comic fiction. James Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1882. He excelled as a student at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, and then at University College Dublin, where he studied English, French, and Italian. Joyce produced several prominent works, including: 'Ulysses',...

This is a new reading of Alan Paton's impassioned novel about a black man's country under white man's law. Set in the troubled and changing South Africa of the 1940s, Cry, the Beloved Country is the deeply moving story of Stephen Kumalo, a Zulu pastor, and his son, Absalom. Written with keen compassion and understanding, the novel powerfully evokes the experience of a land and a people torn by racial injustice. Paton said of his book: “It is a song...

Sauron, the Dark Lord, has gathered to him all the Rings of Power – the means by which he intends to rule Middle-earth. All he lacks in his plans for dominion is the One Ring – the ring that rules them all – which has fallen into the hands of the hobbit, Bilbo Baggins. In a sleepy village in the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself faced with an immense task, as his elderly cousin Bilbo entrusts the Ring to his care. Frodo must leave

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